Thilo Maatsch (1900-1983) - Kaffee Hag

Thilo Maatsch: Composition (Kaffee HAG motif) — from the portfolio La Lune en Rodage III

Original woodcut on vergé paper, signed and dated in the block. Sheet 15.5 × 14.5 cm. The composition builds the field from a small repertoire of black geometric elements — a crenellated, tower-like block answered by an L-form of tall verticals and a solid square — set in taut asymmetric balance against the white ground, with positive form and empty interval carrying equal weight.

The motif derives directly from Maatsch's own advertising design for Kaffee HAG, the decaffeinated coffee of Ludwig Roselius's Bremen company. In the original design (signed "Thilo 25"), the crenellated form and square make up the brand's heraldic device — a stylised castle — framing the slogans "Ruhe und Kraft" and "Coffeinfreier Kaffee HAG." For the present print, Maatsch stripped the design of its lettering and colour and reduced it to its pure constructive skeleton, turning a commercial emblem into an autonomous, non-objective composition. This translation of the applied sign into free geometric form is characteristic of his constructivist work of the 1920s, and makes the sheet a rare document of the direct exchange between advertising design and Constructivism in 1920s Germany.

Thilo Maatsch (Braunschweig 1900 – Königslutter 1983) was a German painter, graphic artist and sculptor, and one of the committed exponents of Constructivism and Concrete art in Germany. A self-taught artist, from 1924 he studied during vacation periods at the Bauhaus, moving in the orbit of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy, and was acquainted with Kurt Schwitters. In 1925 he joined the Novembergruppe, and in 1927 he exhibited at Herwarth Walden's Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin. Under National Socialism his work was condemned as "degenerate." His constructivist compositions of the 1920s remain the core of his reputation.

La Lune en Rodage is the three-volume collective portfolio assembled by the Basel-based publisher, psychoanalyst and collector Carl Laszlo (Pécs 1923 – Basel 2013), issued by Edition Panderma, Basel, in 1960, 1965 and 1977. The three volumes gather a total of some 180 original works and form a dense survey of the European avant-garde between the 1950s and the 1970s. Several of the included works mark turning points in the careers of the artists involved: Enrico Castellani's sheet is regarded as his first documented graphic work, and Piero Manzoni's Achrome as the only multiple the artist ever realised.

Condition: mint archival condition.

Provenance: Edition Panderma, Carl Laszlo, Basel — Galerie von Bartha, Basel.